UPDATE: The Sonnet HARMONi card was incompatible with early versions of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Beige G3 Power Macs don’t have built-in FireWire support, but you can add a FireWire PCI card inexpensively. FireWire EnclosuresįireWire drives are not an option for tray-loading iMacs, unless you have Sonnet’s HARMONi G3 upgrade card, which provides a 600 MHz CPU and FireWire for US$300. The Intech drivers are the only practical solution for older PowerBooks. This is only now becoming an issue for PowerBooks, as the first 160 GB laptop hard drives have only recently begun shipping. For the fourth, see Is Serial ATA a Viable Alternative to Ultra ATA and FireWire? This article examines three: Intech’s drivers, third-party IDE PCI cards, and external FireWire enclosures. There are four ways you can use a drive over 128 GB in older Macs and access their full capacity. 3 Options for Using Big Drives in Macs Never Designed to Support Them
All Titanium PowerBook G4 models with DVI video and all 15″ and 17″ Aluminum PowerBooks support big drives. Neither do the first Titanium PowerBook G4 models (the ones with VGA output), although TiBooks with DVI output do.īig drives are only supported under OS X 10.2 Jaguar and later in iMac G4s, eMacs, 2001 Quicksilver G4s,* 2002 Quicksilvers, and all later desktop Macs.
On the notebook side, no G3 PowerBooks or iBooks support big drives. Macs that don’t include big drive support include tray-loading iMacs, slot-loading iMacs, beige G3s, blue & white G3s, Yikes! G4s, Sawtooth (a.k.a. This is also an issue with external FireWire and USB enclosures: Although the FireWire and USB specifications don’t limit drive size, not all of the bridge chips used in external enclosures support big drives. Big drives need 48-bit addressing, and almost all Macs built before 2002 don’t have built-in support for it. Older IDE specifications made no provision for what have since come to be called “big drives” – those with over 128 GB of storage space.
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If you simply install a big drive in your older Mac, it’s only going to see it as a 128 GB drive.
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You must also be using Mac OS X 10.2 or later, as earlier versions of the Mac OS do not support big drives on the built-in IDE bus. The long answer: Yes, you can, but you may not be able to use more than 128 GB without some third-party assistance. Can I put a 160 GB or larger IDE hard drive in my iMac, eMac, Power Mac, iBook, or PowerBook?